Shortly after Ashok Srivastava became Intuit's chief AI officer in the summer, he merged the artificial intelligence division with the Future team. This team is tasked with understanding and accelerating adoption of AI and other emerging technologies such as quantum computing and blockchain.
This newly formed team is comprised of hundreds of employees across multiple regions including New York, California, and Texas, as well as international offices in Israel and India. This group consists of VPs of Futures and AI/ML (Machine Learning), software engineers, AI scientists, product managers, and AI and ML engineers.
The team's mission, called Intuit Foresight, is to integrate practical applications of AI that can be deployed to support the work of AI research and developers at financial technology companies, and to enable developers to release new AI capabilities for Intuit customers.
“We fundamentally believe that delivering the best outcomes for our customers requires cutting-edge capabilities,” says Srivastava.
An example of his thinking from before the Intuit Foresight team was integrated, but illustrating Srivastava's rationale is his team's critical role in one of Intuit's new accounting AI agents. The agent debuted this summer as part of a collection of AI agents specializing in tasks like financial analysis and payments, and Intuit CEO Sasan Goodarzi called it “the most significant launch in our company's history.”
Srivastava's team used open source AI to create a basic large-scale language model. He said the model is highly accurate but has low latency, which is the time delay between receiving an input and when the AI system can produce an output.
According to Srivastava, the accounting agent saves customers an average of 12 hours per month and achieves more than 90% accuracy on classified transactions. Intuit said categorizing transactions is a repetitive process, but accountants and business clients can monitor it and make adjustments as needed. Over time, the system applies learnings from human feedback to future transaction classification tasks.
“Even if you think about a dozen or so hours saved in a small or medium-sized business, when you multiply that across the millions of businesses we support, it's a huge savings,” Srivastava says.
So far, Intuit's big bet on AI is paying off. In November, the company reported better-than-expected first-quarter results due to growth in its AI products, which were pervasive across its portfolio of brands, including TurboTax, QuickBooks, and Credit Karma. Intuit also signed a $100 million, multi-year agreement with OpenAI last month to bring some of its platform capabilities directly to ChatGPT.
Going forward, AI and generative AI will continue to be a top priority for the Intuit Foresight team. And Srivastava points out that the company has already made a lot of progress in generative AI. Since the launch of AI Agents in July, more than 2 million customers within Intuit's business platform have used these tools, with a repeat business rate of more than 80%. Intuit's technology generated 3,500 different generative AI use cases internally and externally throughout 2025. Within IT departments, generative AI tools have made average coding 40% faster and delivered 39% more code per developer.
Srivastava says that even with all the progress, there is still room for improvement.
“We need models that can perform the best inferences,” he says. “We need models that can perform the best forecasting and scenario planning using financial-specific tools. These technologies are giving us the benefits mentioned above.”
Asked whether other large companies should also set up dedicated “labs” to focus on AI development, Srivastava had some caveats. “If a company doesn't have organized data, doesn't have an AI platform they built or bought, and doesn't have the talent to take advantage of what's available today, it's too early to build a team like this,” Srivastava says. “We've been working on this for almost 10 years.”
Intuit Foresight employs hundreds of people, and the increasingly expensive war for AI talent is also a top concern for Srivastava. Intuit says the salaries it offers are “highly competitive,” based on ongoing benchmarking against market rates and updated as needed.
But Srivastava emphasizes that even though Intuit itself is a financial technology company, the technologists he courtes aren't motivated solely by finance. He said it has a broad mission to serve individual customers and small businesses, which makes it attractive to prospective employees. He has been shocked by the number of people applying for roles on his team, both inside and outside of Intuit, calling the demand “unprecedented.”
“We're very competitive, but my sales pitch is just, 'Come and spend your time and energy making the world a better place,'” he says.
